Electronic devices have attained a singularly important position in the popular music industry. Not only are various electronic devices used to record and playback the industry's main product, but electronics are frequently being used to create new sounds and new forms of music that could not easily be achieved without electronic assistance. For instance, the entire rap music genre is based on the concept of sampling a short segment of music and playing it back repeatedly to create a song. Electronic devices called "Samplers" are exceptionally well suited for use in this musical approach. Samplers are electronic devices which can sample and store short segments of old songs or sounds--samples--for indefinite periods of time. The samples can then be modified, combined and/or played back to create an "entirely new" song at the composer's leisure. While this same effect can be accomplished by a live musician repeating a few notes over and over again, this sort of repetitiveness is most easily accomplished through the use of electronic circuitry.
Furthermore, a wide range of electronic devices have been developed to perform real time modifications of audio signals. These electronic devices--audio processors--have often been designed to either imitate special auditory effects or to achieve new sounds that could not easily be attained without electronic assistance. For example, in the 1960's, one of the Beatles, John Lennon, discovered that he could obtain a distinctive sound by distorting the sound of a tape played on a reel-to-reel tape deck. He achieved his effect by pressing on the flange of one of the tape player's reels to retard the tape's progress. This musical technique called "flanging" spurred several designers into developing methods of electronically imitating the effect. While these designers were able to achieve some success in imitating the flanging sound by using special mathematical algorithms, the resulting imitations were less than perfect reproductions of the effect. In short, the prior art has failed to produce an audio processor that provides satisfactory flanging effects.
Despite the ever expanding role of electronic devices for use in the music industry, the prior art has also failed to develop an audio signal processor with both audio processing and sampling capabilities. Although there are samplers that can perform rudimentary processing of their stored samples, these samplers are incapable of processing external signals in real time. Thus, the prior art only offers devices that perform strictly audio processing functions or strictly sampling functions. As a result, composers are required to purchase discrete units to satisfy both their sampling and audio processing needs.